Cristiano Lima-Strong, reporting for The Washington Post: Congress late Tuesday passed legislation to ban or force a sale of TikTok, delivering a historic rebuke of the video-sharing platform’s Chinese ownership after years of failed attempts to tackle the app’s alleged national security risks. The Senate approved the measure 79 to 18 as part of a sprawling package offering aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, sending the proposal to President Biden’s desk — with the House having passed it Saturday. Biden issued a statement minutes after the Senate vote saying he plans to sign the bill into law ..read more

Apple Newsroom: Following its critically acclaimed fourth season, which has been praised as “the best-written show on all of television” and “superior sci-fi,” Apple TV+’s hit, award-winning space drama series “For All Mankind” has landed a renewal for season five. Additionally, Apple TV+ and “For All Mankind” creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi will expand the “For All Mankind” universe with a brand-new spinoff series, “Star City,” which will be showrun by Nedivi and Wolpert. [...] A robust expansion of the “For All Mankind” universe, “Star City” is a propulsive, paranoid t ..read more

The FTC: Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning noncompetes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation. “Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new busine ..read more

Happy ending to this saga. Remarkable engineering.  ★  ..read more

Viola Zhou, reporting for Rest of World on TSMC’s massive, but now much-delayed, chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix: The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success. Some 2,200 employees now work at TSMC’s Arizona plant, with about half of them deployed from Taiwan. While tension at the plant simmers, TSMC has been ramping up its investments, recently securing bill ..read more

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors: Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of “Let Loose” and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Tim Cook, on Twitter/X: Pencil us in for May 7! ✏️ #AppleEvent The entirety of the iPad lineup is due for updates, and the rumor mill expects a new model, a 13-inch-ish iPad Air. It seems clear a new Apple Pencil is forthcomin ..read more

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels: The backbone of the system would need to accept modules from Apple and other companies, letting users build what they needed in terms of functionality, as D’Agostino writes: (Fitch) designed a simple hardware “backbone” carrying basic operations and I/O on which the user could add a series of “book” modules, carrying hardware for running Apple II, Mac, UNIX and DOS software, plus other modules with disk drives or networking capabilities. This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan setup, pulling together various software platforms ..read more

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